It uses a little more power, but at $250 it's a nice value option.

Performance

The Haswell NUC (model D54250WYK1), which has a dual-core 1.3GHz (2.6GHz Turbo) Core i5-4250U and an Intel HD 5000 GPU.

The Gigabyte Brix Gaming with the BIOS set to Turbo Mode. It has a 2.1GHz (3.1GHz Turbo) AMD A8-5557M and a dedicated Radeon HD X275M GPU with 2GB of GDDR5.

The Ivy Bridge NUC (model DC3217BY), which has a dual-core 1.8GHz Core i3-3217U and an Intel HD 4000 GPU.

Our Intel graphics driver is version 10.18.10.3345. We used the Catalyst 14.3 beta for the AMD GPUs.

As has been the case for several years, Intel's single-threaded CPU performance is much better than AMD's. Generally speaking, it takes two AMD cores to keep up with one of Intel's Haswell cores. The AMD Brix is more competitive for multi-threaded tasks

The other factor to consider is price: the Haswell NUC retails for $390, $140 more than the AMD Brix. You can get Intel NUCs for cheaper, but you give up both CPU and GPU performance to do it, which is even more important to remember when comparing graphics performance among the different boxes.

The AMD Brix has an integrated Radeon HD 8510G GPU, which has 384 of AMD's shaders running at clock speeds of up to 554MHz. The biggest thing limiting this GPU's performance is memory bandwidth—for whatever reason, the A8-5545M is limited to a maximum memory speed of 1333MHz, a 20 percent decrease compared to the 1600MHz clock speed used by every other PC in our lineup. You can see this deficit in Geekbench's memory bandwidth score, and it's keeping the integrated GPU from being as good as it could be.

Even with that odd handicap, the 8510G can equal the Intel NUC's HD 5000 in every one of our benchmarks, despite being $140 cheaper. Intel mini PCs in the same price range either use Ivy Bridge CPUs with HD 4000 GPUs or lower-end Haswell CPUs with HD 4400 GPUs (the HD 4400 is faster than the HD 4000, but not by much). The AMD Brix is much faster than either—if you're looking for something that can play light games, the AMD Brix may be a better value for the money.

Linux support: Ubuntu and SteamOS

Further Reading

Intel's mini desktop handles four prominent distros with a few headaches.

As we've done with other mini-desktops, we briefly installed both Ubuntu 14.04 and the latest SteamOS beta to see what works out of the box. The Brix Gaming had some trouble here, mostly related to its dual-GPU setup and its Wi-Fi card. The smaller, less-exotic AMD Brix fares a bit better.

The smaller Brix uses a slower, cheaper, but more common 2.4GHz 802.11n card based on a Realtek RTL8723AE chipset, which is better-supported than the newer and still-rare 802.11ac Realtek chipset used in more expensive Brixes. You can swap this card out for a faster one if you want, but it connected to our network and worked as expected, as did the integrated GPU. It also goes to sleep and wakes back up with no trouble. If you can install Linux on something without having some problem with one or all of these three things, you're doing a pretty good job.

The biggest problem we noticed with Ubuntu 14.04 on this computer was a sizable increase in idle power consumption—it used about 16.5W of power idling at the desktop, compared to about 11.2W in Windows. Switching from the open-source Radeon driver to AMD's proprietary version seemed to help a little bit, reducing idle power consumption to around 15.0W, but Ubuntu still seems to idle higher than Windows does.

As for SteamOS, we had some of the same problems we had with the Brix Gaming. The installation process is fine, but somewhere in between the initial driver installation and booting into the SteamOS user interface the computer stops sending an image to the monitor. The monitor appears to be receiving a signal, since it doesn't switch off or go to sleep as it would if the computer was off, you just can't see or do anything. The same version of SteamOS works flawlessly on our Intel mini PCs, so we'll keep blaming the graphics drivers and the still-in-beta operating system.

Value for the money

Enlarge/ The Brix is pretty close to the NUC in most ways, but it's a fair bit cheaper.

Andrew Cunningham

In some ways, this smaller AMD Brix makes a better case for itself than the Brix Gaming. That box delivers on its stated promise—good graphics performance in the smallest package possible—but it's loud and a little power hungry.

This Brix isn't the best at any one thing, but it gives you a good combination of CPU and GPU performance, power consumption, size, and price. It performs roughly as well as Intel's best Haswell NUC but costs $140 less, and it has much better graphics performance than any of the lower-end, Intel-based NUCs and Brixes (even though we're still talking about integrated graphics performance here). It's a great option for light gaming, HTPC use, or even if you want a small, reasonably capable, no-fuss Ubuntu workstation.

The good

Offers a good mix of CPU and GPU performance for the money

Small, quiet, and easy to upgrade

Enough performance for lighter or older games and HTPC use

The bad

Full CPU speeds not available without a BIOS tweak

Single-threaded CPU performance consistently worse than Intel's

Uses more power than equivalent Intel machines

The ugly

The memory speed limitation is irritating, since AMD's integrated GPUs need all the bandwidth they can get

Promoted Comments

Actually, I have one at home, for about two weeks now. And it's a preety great piece of hardware.I have it set up as a XBMC and Steam box, for streaming games from my gaming PC.

The only culprit of it, is that you can't set VRAM size in BIOS. I've tried to setup VDPAU in Ubuntu with the Radeon OSS drivers, but the device fails to init when starting a Steam stream. I guess it's because it only has 265MB of VRAM available, as XBMC and mplayer work perfectly with hw decoding.

In Windows on the other hand, the GPU has 768MB VRAM available, and another 1,2GB of shared RAM. AMD's drivers on Windows are also better, and support HW decoding, so everything runs smoothly.

@ads2, the CPU actually does support virtualization, but I haven't tried how it works.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.